An exercise in biblical inspiration: Did Adam live 900 years?

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catholic1seeks said:
I do not think faith and scientific data can very well be reconciled if we take Genesis overly literally.
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If God can create the universe and life, then he has the power to give Adam a lifespan of 930 years. Science cannot explain creation; but it happened. If science cannot explain a lifespan of 930 years, then I see this as a problem for science. God is not impotent.

Eternal salvation, means that God has the power to give us eternal life, not just a mere 930 years. There is no point asking for a scientific explanation for eternal life.

I might be called a fundamentalist for such views, but I put my trust in God.
 
Benadam said:
plus, the residual effects of eating from the tree of life a possibility for long lives according to St Thomas
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The scripture never says they explicitly ate from it though…

But that’s an interesting theory nonetheless. Personally though, I always thought choosing one or the other tree was a test of sorts… and Adam and Eve chose poorly. Therefore were moved out, away from it. Because the worst thing that could happen is the effects of sin AND long life from the Tree of Life. Cutting us off from it would be one of God’s first mercies, in fact. For we wouldn’t need to suffer in corruption indefinitely.
 
I think it’s a reasonable assumption that they did
Not easy to assume they didn’t.
 
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If the bible said, “And Adam lived for more than 900 years. This is 100% factual.” would you suddenly believe that the Bible was 100% factual? Would you hang your hat on another part of the bible that seemed to you to be difficult to believe?

Is there any answer that would satisfy a nonbelievers nonbelief?
 
If the bible said, “And Adam lived for more than 900 years. This is 100% factual.” would you suddenly believe that the Bible was 100% factual? Would you hang your hat on another part of the bible that seemed to you to be difficult to believe?

Is there any answer that would satisfy a nonbelievers nonbelief?
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Are you insinuating that a Catholic must believe Adam literally lived 900 years? If so, please review the other posts in this thread, including the ones re: the Catechism and the passages from Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Exhortation on Scripture.
 
If God can create the universe and life, then he has the power to give Adam a lifespan of 930 years. Science cannot explain creation; but it happened.
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I’m not sure what “science cannot explain creation” means. I hope this doesn’t fall into a “God of the Gaps” argument.

But more importantly, this isn’t about what God can or cannot do. It’s about Truth: We know truth from Scripture yes, but also from scientific data. Truth cannot contradict truth. If they contradict, then we must carefully modify our understanding.

(Such happened in the days of Galileo. People assumed the Earth was the center of the Cosmos — there was no reason to think otherwise. But when scientific evidence showed contrary, Christians had to adjust the way they interpreted certain passages that seemed to suggest Earth’s stationary position in the cosmos. Like this conversation on Adam and his lifespan, Christians then had to re-evaluate what Scripture was asserting about the Cosmos.)
 
I think it’s just as a reasonable an assumption that they didn’t. For in the book of Revelation, the Tree of Life sits in the center of New Jerusalem and grants eternal life. Not merely life. And why would God allow patriarchs to continue eating such a thing, if he closed off the garden? And again, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, it seems rather cruel to intentionally bestow such a long life when sin and corruption came into the world. It’s a blessing in disguise that we don’t live so long! In these non-resurrected bodies, I mean.
 
The patriarchs didn’t eat but benefited from the residual effect of their parents eating.
 
No. I personally I come as close to not believing the 900 years as you can without making it 100%. Put me down for 99%. I have read about this issue in the past during my own bible study. There are enough different schools of thought that my curiosity was satisfied. My 1% holdout is that with God, all things are possible.

My response was just an observation about people who don’t believe in God or the bible. Often no answer will satisfy them until they have a personal encounter with God. I could be wrong, but that was the point I got out of the general discussion.

I just don’t know how you can explain a personal encounter with God in 3 paragraphs. If I did, I would have expressed it.
 
Long for overcoming sin in their souls not just for them but the entire human race.
 
I see. Maybe you’re right. I’ll have to think about it more. Kind of conflicts with my notions of what they represent, but I could very well be wrong. I think of the Tree of Life as granting eternal life (mostly from it referenced in Revelation), but it could simply be life, period. I think it was the road for Adam and Eve to grow closer to God, but they chose the road that separated them (Knowledge of Good and Evil), which I kind of see as the birth of the ego and the false notion of Self and “I am” (lowercase “I am”, as opposed to God, the true I AM). My thoughts on all of this get a bit wonky, I admit… so I won’t waste too much of your time with it 🙂
 
Eric_Hyom said:
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catholic1seeks:
I do not think faith and scientific data can very well be reconciled if we take Genesis overly literally.
Click to expand...
If God can create the universe and life, then he has the power to give Adam a lifespan of 930 years. Science cannot explain creation; but it happened. If science cannot explain a lifespan of 930 years, then I see this as a problem for science. God is not impotent.
Click to expand...
Then it’s a problem for science in the same way explaining the hammered dome in the sky is a problem for science.

God’s potency is not the issue.
God has the power to create you and I without original sin also. Did God do that? God has the power to save us without struggle. Did God do that?
God does not conform his power to our demands.

God’s absolute potency is not in conflict with God’s revealed nature.

God reveals himself. God is Logos, through Jesus Christ. That means God is reason-able. God can be known. God is not known absolutely, but what God reveals is, well… knowable.

Human words…that’s what scripture is…are one of the ways God reveals himself.
While God reveals Himself through human words as he wills, human words are not God. Human words are set in the full human condition, at the same time human words accomplish all that God wills without error.
 
goout said:
Then it’s a problem for science in the same way explaining the hammered dome in the sky is a problem for science.

God’s potency is not the issue.

God has the power to create you and I without original sin also. Did God do that? God has the power to save us without struggle. Did God do that?

God does not conform his power to our demands.

God’s absolute potency is not in conflict with God’s revealed nature.

God reveals himself. God is Logos, through Jesus Christ. That means God is reason-able. God can be known. God is not known absolutely, but what God reveals is, well… knowable.

Human words…that’s what scripture is…are one of the ways God reveals himself.

While God reveals Himself through human words as he wills, human words are not God. Human words are set in the full human condition, at the same time human words accomplish all that God wills without error.
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Well, we were created without “original sin”. God saw all creation as good, as the scriptures say. The fall, and more importantly, Death, came later.

edit: err… wait, you mean all of us individually? OK.
 
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I have posted these passages many times, which are Magisterial thought…and they never generate any comment.
People are either not interested in knowing the material or …
I don’t know what option 2 is.
Maybe they disagree with it and are afraid to admit so in public.
 
At it’s heart, the human misunderstanding of inerrancy is a misunderstanding of the Incarnation.
To be consistent, a literalist should have the exact same problem with Jesus’s Incarnation as with the inerrancy of scripture.

Christ is God, and is fully human at the same time. Christ is both the Son of God, Second Person of the Trinity, and is also a man who subjected himself to hardship, torture, and death. He is fully both. The seeming scandal of being one with his creation does not take away his divinity. Scripture has this same unity.

Both/and.

The problems we have with the human element of Scripture do not detract from God’s inerrant accomplishing of God’s will. That is to make scripture an either/or proposition.
“Either it’s all literally true as we understand true, or it can’t be inerrant.”
And that’s not the case.

God both breathes his life into Scripture, and it is expressed through fully human words, which are full of hidden meaning, contradictions, and scientific errors.

Maybe that is God’s greatest demonstration of power, he makes the both/and a reality.
 
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I can believe in both, but they’re also Great Mysteries to me as well. The flawed element in all of this is me/us… and trying to describe inspiration and incarnation with our own feeble human grasp of those things.
 
I try to, but I’m very partial to patristic writers when we speak of the Church. Forgive me for casting some suspicion on my NAB notes 😃
 
No. And there weren’t fourteen generations from David to Jesus either. Sometimes the writers of the bible use numerology to teach another type of truth. It’s just a literary technique
 
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